Global Arc

This course will explore in some detail a diverse range of applications of game theory drawn from a wide variety of fields in economics. The latter include finance (no trade theorems on the one hand and bubbles and crashes at the other extreme), industrial organization (oligopolistic collusion), information economics (herd behavior), behavioral economics (time inconsistency and procrastination, self control and self confidence, psychological games and applications to issues of fairness, and feelings of guilt), matching markets (resident matching with hospitals, school choice and kidney exchange), auctions (design of spectrum auctions).

A survey of the concepts and techniques that non-managers use to hold the managers of organized human activity--chiefly corporations--accountable for the resources entrusted to them. Alerts students to the judgments and assumptions that regulators and managers make in that process, even when the managers wish to report honestly. Explores the methods that the managers of resources can (and often do) use to lie about their actual performance. To become sophisticated users, not producers, of financial state¬ments, students must master some record keeping procedures and vocabulary in order to exercise proper oversight of managerial behavior.

This course will teach students about financial risk management through the lens of the financial crisis that began in August 2007. Topics covered will include market risk, credit risk, liquidity risk, and systemic risk. Students will draw on their background in economics, finance, probability theory and statistics. The class will be in seminar format and active participation in the discussion is encouraged. Prerequisites: 362 and 465.

This course will use economic theory and empirical evidence to study the causes of financial crises and the effectiveness of policy responses to these crises. Particular attention will be given to some of the major economic and financial crises in the past century and to the crisis that began in August 2007. Prerequisite: 202 or equivalent, and 310.

With its rapid economic growth in the past three decades, China already has the world's second largest economy. Meanwhile its financial markets are also being quickly liberalized and integrated with the rest of the world. As the current trend continues, there are growing interests to learn and understand the workings of China's financial and monetary systems. This course aims to serve this objective with a particular emphasis on understanding the role provided by the financial system in facilitating China's economic development, in addition to the investment opportunities and risk presented by the system to the outside world.

Seminar draws on expertise of guest faculty from Princeton and elsewhere to provide a broad, multidisciplinary perspective on turning points in European culture from the late middle ages to the present. Gateway course for ECS and Contemporary European Politics and Society. Topics in literature, art, music, philosophy, political theory, history of science. One three-hour seminar.

Counter to received wisdom, it is in the Romantic period, not the 20th century, that war assumes its modern form as "total war." We will examine how literary, philosophical, and artistic Romanticisms grapple with this new phenomenon. Subtopics include: war, media, technology; landscape, spectatorship, and the sublime; cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and the concept of Europe. Readings from Kant, Hegel, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Fichte, Clausewitz, Kleist, Stendhal, Austen, de Quincey, and Hazlitt, along with recent scholarship on this topic (Bell, Favret, Mieszkowski), and relevant critical theory (Freud, Butler).

The seminar explores concepts and representations of melancholy in ancient and pre-modern medicine, medieval theology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, European art since the Romantic era (painting, literature, and film), critical theory, social media, and ethnography. Course material has been chosen both for contextualization of melancholic (or depressive) condition in the history of European culture and for variety of interpretive approaches. Among major issues to be considered are the human experience of loss and the situation of the person in society.

What is the relationship between the modern media and violent crime? Murder is certainly a favorite topic of yellow journalism, but some would also argue that the media provoke criminal behavior through the very act of depicting it. By looking at how murder is "composed" in a number of popular media ranging from detective literature to crime scene photography, this seminar investigates the feedback loop between crime and its representation in modern life. While the course covers a variety of texts from the 19th century to the postwar period, the historical focus of the seminar will be the crime-obsessed culture of Weimar Germany.

How did modernist writers around the world imagine and represent other worlds in relation to their own? How were tangled lines of connection and disjuncture, locality, inter- and outer-nationality, movement and stasis, given form in different places and situations? Does this have anything to do with the specificity of what we call "modernism" in literature? Can modernism sabotage a globalizing modernity? We trace lines of (dis)connection--from Harlem to Paris to a wider black diaspora encompassing Africa and the Caribbean; from England to the Americas; below the nation in colonial India; and from the Antilles to Algeria to France.